PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A cutting-edge Philadelphia startup got some high level attention when it hosted visitors from the Trump administration on Tuesday.
Less than six months ago, the company Albacore was headquartered in the kitchen of co-founder John Huddleston. Now it occupies a large space that used to be Colonial Marble and Granite in South Philadelphia and has a defense contract for unmanned underwater vehicles.
“They went out of business and so we purchased the factory, converted it into a drone submarine manufacturing facility here,” said Huddleston, showing off the place to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler and a U.S. Department of Defense official.
Loeffler said federal officials were there to highlight the fact that 70% of the defense industrial base are small businesses like Albacore.
“Private sector innovators, entrepreneurs that are taking risks to build for America, create jobs and secure our national security,” she said.
Huddleston said he began Albacore because he saw U.S. capability lagging as drones became more important weapons. He says Albacore will put the country in the lead underwater.
“You can go over a thousand nautical miles and we can stay undersea for over 30 days,” he said, “that’s 10 to 20 times better than anything else that’s existed to date.”
His partner, Dante Visbort, said they built the prototype just 14 months ago in Huddleston’s kitchen.
“We have basically the shrunk down version of what was used in WWII but in a mass-produceable, autonomous form,” he explained. “You can use them for long-range persistent intelligence or you can use them for a strike.”
But Huddleston said the drones also have peaceful uses. “We are gathering data that is also useful for the progress of science and understanding our climate change,” he said.
Albacore currently has 25 employees but Huddleston said they plan to triple that, with a goal of churning out a thousand underwater drones a year.
